Typical applications for GIS

The application potential of GIS is enormous and far from exhausted. In general it can be said that GIS can be used wherever maps (thematic maps) are used for planning, documentation and decision making and where data can be linked by a common spatial reference. GIS applications diversity (see also Bill, 2016, Chapter 9) is therefore an important driver of the GIS market development today.

Under the generic term "GIS", various specialized information systems have developed in recent years. In the sum of these GIS characteristics listed below, increasingly large data sets are being created which are made available to other users via the Internet or Intranet, storage media/data carriers or other distribution mechanisms such as cloud solutions. The result is a national harmonized spatial data infrastructure and open data offerings (see Chapter 4 in Bill, 2016, on data sources and portals, access via the portal of portals provided in OpenGeoEdu is recommended), which will enable many other user groups to gain access to geoinformatics.

GIS is accepted as a standard tool for spatial data processing and is increasingly being fully integrated into business processes throughout enterprises and organisations. The improved availability of data as well as the uniform spatial reference given in GIS allows a common processing, in which e.g. different topics are superimposed and combined to new information.